BEFORE: OK, it's Thursday but another weekend is coming shortly - I just have to work one more shift tonight then it's a 3-day weekend so I can catch up, or at least not fall behind. I still have my free day in September left, I'll probably use it next week, not this week, unless using it this week makes any actor's birthday line up with the calendar. I've been close a couple times lately but close doesn't count, does it?
Robert Morgan carries over from "The Accountant 2". It looks like this film will satisfies two of this month's running themes, sports & back to school. Well all right then, a twofer should save me a lot of time, even though it really doesn't. This also feels like the kind of Oscar bait that should have received at least one nomination, though it looks like it didn't end up getting any. Well, it wasn't for lack of trying, at least, I saw a bunch of guild screening inviations for this one, so someone thought they were sitting on a gold mine.
Speaking of nominations, I sped through the Emmys last night, skipping over nearly every acceptance speech (except Colbert's and Oliver's) and nearly everything else that wasn't a list of nominees. Got through the whole thing in under an hour. Oh, also I watched the "In Memoriam" segment because I'm not a monster, also I wanted to see if any stars died that I missed hearing about.
THE PLOT: A 1930's set-story centered on the University of Washington's rowing team, from their Depression-era beginnings.
AFTER: Well, we're back in the Great Depression, time of "Of Mice and Men" and farm laborers and such. What a terrible time to be in your twenties and not be able to afford to go to college. Did colleges lower their tuition back then when most people had no jobs and less money? I kind of doubt it, but I have no real way to look that one up. We see everyman Joe Rantz living out of an abandoned car in a junkyard because he can't afford both tuition and an apartment. Honestly I don't know how anybody lived through those dark times, I've been on partial unemployment myself for months now and I'm living sort of month-to-month. Oh, I've got a savings account but I don't want to touch it, that's for a REALLY rainy day, like a pouring thunderstorm, so I just keep putting money in my checking account every week and then it's all gone again after the first of the month.
Joe's behind on his tuition at the U. of Washington, but his buddy Roger comes up with a plan, all they have to do is make the rowing team and then the university pays them room and board, and I guess then they get sort of a de facto scholarship? That part's a bit unclear, it seems more like the college pays the athletes but then they have to give the money back in tuition, that kind of makes no sense. But whatever works, I guess, now all they have to do is make the 8-man squad, get chosen out of the 60 or 70 people trying out and everything is jake, easy street, the bee's knees or the cat's pajamas. Come on, it's rowing a boat, how hard could THAT be?
Well, funny story, crew is really one of the hardest sports out there, the rowers are pushed to their physical limits and beyond, they require twice as much oxygen as the human body can take in, and the amount of calories they have to expend is almost incalculable, so I guess that's why they pay them, so they can afford extra food so they'll have enough energy to propel this damn boat. I can't say the sport really makes much sense, like I don't run or job but I can see the human body getting conditioned to running to the point where someone can run a marathon, that's an individual effort, but putting 8 guys on a thin boat and expecting them to act in perfect rhythm to move a boat with 8 guys on it faster than that other team can, this is a form of madness, right? I can see putting two men in a boxing ring and expecting them to beat the stuffing out of each other until one man drops, that sort of makes sense, but this is off-the-charts berzerko.
Why do we even need crew, after they invented boats with motors? I guess some people still ride horses, even though cars exist, but is this still a sport or just a nostalgia thing? Like, it sure seems like a lot of unnecessary work now, just get a boat with a motor on it and then you DON'T HAVE TO ROW ANY MORE. What? This is still somehow in the Olympics? So if something is completely unnecessary in life we just turn it into a sport? Like horse racing and javelin and skeet shooting, they took something that used to be important for human survival and now people just do it for fun and as some kind of challenge? That's pretty stupid. Like time moves on, we don't treat people with leeches and potions any more or cast demons out of people who just had epilepsy or something, so I propose we don't need so many sports, and it's high time we started cutting some of them out of the college programs. You can start with crew and then we can cut some of the track & field events, I'm fine with that.
Another funny story, the coaches pick the "right" 8 guys and then figure out the best positions for each one to sit in on the boat, and the master boatwright for the school goes above and beyond and builds a really, really nice hull and Joe stays late after practice to help paint it or put varnish on it or whatever, because the boatwright is kind of like the father he never had, so with the extra care and the fast boat and the perfect team working in perfect rhythm, they actually manage to win some races. Why, this JV squad is even better than the varsity squad, sure, I get it, that kind of happened to me at NYU when I made the College Bowl team (trivia, not football). Our JV squad, with me on it, was better than some other college's varsity teams, it happens. But then the coach wants to send the JV squad to the Poughkeepsie Crew event, which is where the U.S. Olympic team finds its best squads, and the dean throws a fit. Look, just say the Varsity squad sucks, this is all easily settled - or just have the varsity squad race the juniors, wouldn't that be the easiest way to settle this?
Other questions persist - how did they get the boat to Germany for the Olympics? Did they have to buy like 8 extra seats on the airplane to fit the boat on there? Or did the airline make them check their boat? That's a precision piece of engineering, that rowing hull. You can't just put that on the conveyor belt and trust the baggage handlers with that? No, this is a serious question, how did they get the boat to Germany, they didn't exactly have FedEx or DHL back then.
Also, I don't really understand the strategy, if the crew can do 40 strokes a minute, why then would you have them row at any other speed? A race is all about speed, what is the benefit, if any, of not rowing as fast as you can, all the time? I guess maybe they get more tired, sure, but the race doesn't seem that long, why isn't it go faster, faster, faster all the time? You never hear about a jockey trying to win with a strategy of going slow at first to lull the other jockeys into a false sense of security, that seems ridiculous. Like I get why some car racers want to stay in second place for parts of the race, because they're drifting behind a faster car and then saving on fuel by cutting down resistance or something like that. But please, tell me, exactly, what benefit is achieved by not asking a rowing crew to row as fast as they possibly can.
Also, why is the rowing event, or any sport, broadcast on the radio? Nobody could see it, everyone was just relying on what some commentator said to know what happened. I wonder how sports made it through that difficult time before television was invented, you would think that radio would have been considered a poor substitute for going out and watching that sport live, why do I never see anyone in movies complaining about not being able to see the game? Nobody was unhappy with just HEARING the sport happen? I would think the inability to watch the sport probably caused ticket sales to increase, but what am I missing here?
Anyway, you can probably guess what happens at the 1936 Olympics, which were held in Berlin and attended by Adolf Hitler. I happen to know that there is a whole group of actors out there who bear some resemblance to Hitler, or have Hitler-shaped faces or are known by casting directors for their ability and/or willingness to portray Hitler. I know this because I once had to cast an actor in a film to play Hitler, and got a large response to the casting call. Some of them even have their own Hitler outfits, which means they're ready, willing and able to play Hitler on short notice, and I wonder if this ever causes any problems in their personal lives, like do they have to explain to friends why they have a Nazi officer's uniform in their closet, or do they get strange looks when they pick up their dry cleaning? Just asking.
Directed by George Clooney (director of "The Tender Bar" and "The Midnight Sky")
Also starring Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Kinky Boots"), Callum Turner (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumblebore"), Peter Guinness (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Sam Strike, Thomas Elms, Jack Mulhern, Luke Slattery (last seen in "Late Night"), Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Wil Coban (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Thomas Stephen Varey, Joel Phillimore (last seen in "Tolkien"), James Wolk (last seen in "For a Good Time, Call..."), Hadley Robinson (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Courtney Henggeler (last seen in "Friends with Benefits"), Chris Diamantopoulos (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Glenn Wrage (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Edward Baker-Duly (last seen in "De-Lovely"), Adrian Lukis (last seen in "Judy"), Dominic Tighe (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Alec Newman (last seen in "The Snowman"), Andrew Bridgemont (last seen in "The King's Man"), Jack Staddon, Jacob James Beswick (last seen in "1917"), Jyuddah James, Frankie Fox (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Sam Douglas (last seen in "Tár"), David Stoller (last seen in "Disobedience"), Austin Haynes, Nicholas Cass-Beggs, Johnny O'Dowd, Nick Tajan, Ian McElhinney (last seen in "Zoo"), Laurel Lefkow (last seen in "Fair Play"), Tyler Davis, Kirsty MacLaren, Tom Claxton, Lucy Appleton, Daniel Philpott, Wally Wingert (last heard in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Lucas Allermann, Jaymes Butler (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Milo James, Callum Macreadie (last seen in "Here"), Christopher Parramore, Jerry Ronson, Chris Wilson (last seen in "Attack the Block")
RATING: 6 out of 10 coxswains
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